I still think they are cool, but impractical. Anyhow, I started to poke around the net regarding the Segway. I ran across a blog entry that featured a photo of the Segway Beta. This was a humorous mock-up showing a man riding a hand cart backward. The idea tickled my fancy so I decided to do a little promotional video spoof featuring this “Segway Beta”. Being relatively new to creating videos, I had a learning curve to overcome. It took me 8 hours to make a 1 minute spot with a few basic special effects. I won’t consider it time well spent until the video is viewed once for every minute I put into it.

I put the video on a Squidoo page. The page is a kind of mock landing page for the Segway Beta. I don’t expect that I will sell too many hand carts as a result.

All this, of course, is a huge diversion from what I really should have been doing, finishing up video for my Toilet website, and adding a section on rice to InDepthInfo. But sometimes you have to pick up a project because it is plain fun.

I don’t think that the low commissions then are why the Segway hasn’t been the revolution in human transportation that its manufacturers and the fawning press predicted a few years ago. The Segway is still around, in fact I saw it in a cameo in a Superbowl commercial the other day. It never caught on because it would be hard to park securely in the city. It is ultimately limited by its battery. I can see it being handy for a supervisor in a warehouse, but for going downtown to Seattle to go shopping? Where do you put the packages? How do you get it on the bus if coming in from the suburbs? No, it really is just an item to tool around the neighborhood as a brief novelty. The price of the item is pretty steep, when you could just get yourself a motorized scooter!

Well, I don’t think the Kindle is quite so impractical. Yet it has the same feel. People are not ready to give up their books, and those who are don’t have time to read books anyway. They are too busy IMing or Blogging, or plugging into the 24 hour news cycle. Having written a few books, I thought I would check out the Kindle with a view to publishing one of my previously unpublished works. (I have an inventory of these larger than I would like to admit.) The publishing process proved so cumbersome, I gave up after three hours of fiddling. I am no techno-geek, but I am not a babe on the internet highway either. When, I finally gave up working on it at 1:00 in the morning, I thought, “I’ll finish this up tomorrow.” But I never could make myself get back to it. There were too many higher priority items to work on, like making a video, or playing a game of minesweep.

Well, if the interface for converting a word document to Kindle is that unfriendly, I am wondering how the interface is with the reader. The hardest thing about it is that battery thing. You want to be able to take a book camping. You want to be able to plop it on the library table and wander around looking for another and not have to worry that someone is going to pick it up and wander off with it. It may well be tough and rugged, but can you make margin notes or dog-ear your favorite pages? I could be wrong in this pronouncement, but the time for the Kindle has not quite arrived. In fact, I think it will become passe in the near future. It will be like the Segway in that we will think back and smile at our naivete in a few years hence.

Even so, I think a good book reader that will blow our socks off is just around the corner, and I will have to eat my words. Luckily they will be tiny dots of light and not ink stained pages.